How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

They’re depressing because even when they don’t agree on anything else, they provide an astonishingly detailed and wide-ranging litany of the ways that thinking goes astray—the infinitely varied paths we can take toward the seemingly inevitable dead end of Getting It Wrong.

This is what thinking is: not the decision itself but what goes into the decision, the consideration, the assessment. It’s testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence; it’s grasping, as best you can and with all available and relevant senses, what is, and it’s also speculating, as carefully and responsibly as you can, about what might be. And it’s knowing when not to go it alone, and whom you should ask for help.

A few years ago, the eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman summarized a lifetime of research into cognitive error in a big book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, and near the end of that book he came around to the really central question: “What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us?” To which he replies: “The short answer is that little can be achieved without a considerable investment of effort.”

It is perhaps presumptuous of me to think that I can offer a more hopeful picture than the great Daniel Kahneman, but I truly believe that there are some insufficiently explored ways to understand and ameliorate the problems we have in thinking. We have thought too much in recent years about the science of thinking and not enough about the art. There are certain humanistic traditions, some of them quite ancient, that can come to our aid when we’re trying to think about thinking, and to get better at it.

Robinson concludes this reflection with the sobering comment that in such an environment “unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension,” not because we live in a society of conscious and intentional heresy hunters, though to some extent we do, “but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus.” If you want to think, then you are going to have to shrink that “hypertrophic instinct for consensus.” But given the power of that instinct, it is extremely unlikely that you, dear reader, are willing to go to that trouble.

T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.” And in such circumstances—let me add emphasis to Eliot’s conclusion—“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”

Anyone who claims not to be shaped by such forces is almost certainly self-deceived. Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world. For most of us the question is whether we have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

In 1991 Harding published a powerful essay on this phenomenon. Aren’t anthropologists, she asked, intrinsically interested in cultural structures and practices that are different from their own? Why, then, were so many of them repelled by the idea of studying such difference when the difference lived right next door, and could vote in the same elections the anthropologists voted in? The title of Harding’s essay is “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other,” and the phrase repugnant cultural other is one that we will have cause to employ in the pages to come. In fact, it will turn up so often that we’d best give it an initialism: RCO.

This is a profoundly unhealthy situation. It’s unhealthy because it prevents us from recognizing others as our neighbors—even when they are quite literally our neighbors. If I’m consumed by this belief that that person over there is both Other and Repugnant, I may never discover that my favorite television program is also his favorite television program; that we like some of the same books, though not for precisely the same reasons; that we both know what it’s like to nurse a loved one through a long illness. All of which is to say that I may all too easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience. The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

whoever it was who first said that happiness is something one cannot aim straight at, but rather can achieve only by focusing on other good things, could have said it about thinking and been equally correct.

Stories of forbidden knowledge come in many varieties, but in our time this is one of the more common: the tale of a community that provides security in exchange for thought, and the courageous member of that community who, daring to think, sacrifices the security.

This ending deprives us of the easy comforts that Sapere aude stories tend to offer—the reassurance that, though life in the bigger world may be hard at times, may even be miserable, it is nonetheless the right trade to make because the security of community is not really the most vital thing in the long run. Le Guin’s swerve from the more familiar form of the trope says: We don’t know that. To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.

Megan Phelps-Roper didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with different people. To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”

one must have a certain kind of character: one must be a certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just of thought but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can produce meaningful action.

The second component is this: when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that landscape in the way that it deserves; to have your feelings moved in a very different direction by the sight of people living in abject poverty is to respond to that situation in the way that it deserves. The latter example is especially relevant to someone like Mill who wishes to be a social reformer: if your analysis leads you to the conclusion that is it unjust that people suffer in poverty in a wealthy country, but your feelings do not match your analysis, then something has gone awry with you.

this for Mill is what it means to have character: to be fully alive in all your parts and therefore ready to perceive the world as it is—and to act responsibly toward it.

Gladwell assumes that if Wilt had been thinking rationally, the only thing he would have been concerned about was success in his job.

changing your mind could yield a different you. But the whole ethos of the YPU, in Libresco’s experience, was built around the willingness to expose yourself to just such a risk. To be “broken on the floor” was a token of good faith and an indication of a willingness not just to accept but to live out the values of the community.

In the previous chapter I wrote that we always think with others, and Libresco’s story illustrates that point. It also suggests that our ability to think well will be determined to some considerable degree by who those others are: what we might call the moral form of our community. A willingness to be “broken on the floor,” for example, is in itself a testimony to belief that the people you’re debating are decent people who don’t want to harm or manipulate you—whereas if you don’t trust people you’re unlikely to allow them anything like a “victory” over you. This suggests that the problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think.

This, I think, is how our “moral matrices,” as Haidt calls them, are formed: we respond to the irresistible draw of belonging to a group of people whom we happen to encounter and happen to find immensely attractive. We may be acting under the influence of strong genetic predispositions, but how those dispositions are activated seems largely to be a matter of what particular people one happens to bump into and when. The element of sheer contingency here is, or ought to be, terrifying: had we encountered a group of equally attractive and interesting people who held very different views, then we too would hold very different views.

But for people of all ages, some form of genuine membership is absolutely necessary for thinking. We have already seen that it is not possible to “think for yourself” in the sense of thinking independently of others; and we have likewise seen how the pressures imposed on us by Inner Rings make genuine thinking almost impossible by making belonging contingent on conformity. The only real remedy for the dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to, true membership in, a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.

For a twenty-first-century person with a smartphone as well as for the prehistoric hunter-gatherer on the savanna, isolation is deadly, while genuine solidarity is life-giving. The problem that arises for us, as opposed to our hunter-gatherer forebears, is the need to distinguish between “genuine solidarity” and participation in an Inner Ring.

there can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.

Here we might recall the “unscrupulousness,” the headlong rush forward, of the optimists Roger Scruton critiques. When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest it in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia. (An “adversary” is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable—indeed, it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries. As a nineteenth-century pope notoriously commented, “Error has no rights.” Caught up by the momentum of his or her cause, the Optimist can easily forget the vital addendum to the papal statement made by Orestes Brownson: “Error has no rights, but the man who errs has equal rights with him who errs not.”*4

Indeed, one might say that neither More nor Luther can see his dialectical opponent as his neighbor—and therefore neither understands that even in long-distance epistolary debate Christians are obliged to love their neighbors as themselves. Maybe the very philosophical concept of “the Other” arises only when certain communicative technologies allow us to converse with people who are not in any traditional or ordinary sense our neighbors. In his book Works of Love, Kierkegaard sardonically comments, “Neighbor is what philosophers would call the other.”

we might now note that it was, more than a hundred years later, confirmed by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, as he explains in his powerful book Descartes’ Error. Damasio discovered that when people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised. They use reason alone—and, it turns out, reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.

What System 1 does for us is to provide us with a repertoire of biases, biases that reduce the decision-making load on our conscious brains. These biases aren’t infallible, but they provide what Kahneman calls useful “heuristics”: they’re right often enough that it makes sense to follow them and not to try to override them without some good reason (say, if you’re someone whose calling in life is to help homeless people). We simply would not be able to navigate through life without these biases, these prejudices—the cognitive demands of having to assess every single situation would be so great as to paralyze us. That’s why the English essayist William Hazlitt wrote, “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. Reason may play the critic, and correct certain errors afterwards; but if we were to wait for its formal and absolute decisions in the shifting and multifarious combinations of human affairs, the world would stand still.” So we need the biases, the emotional predispositions, to relieve that cognitive load. We just want them to be the right ones.

And this is why learning to think with the best people, and not to think with the worst, is so important. To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices.

Translating Hobbes’s point into contemporary English: Literacy (“letters”) is an extraordinary invention because of its power to amplify existing traits. By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.

Decades ago the idiosyncratic literary critic Kenneth Burke wrote a brilliant essay called “Terministic Screens,” in which he made this point. Whenever we use a particular vocabulary—political, say, or aesthetic, or moral, or religious, or sociological—to describe a person, or a thing, or an event, we call attention to certain aspects of what we’re describing. But we also, as long as we look through the screen of that language, inadvertently hide from ourselves, become blind to, other aspects. Burke doesn’t believe we have a choice about whether or not to employ terministic screens: “We can’t say anything without the use of terms.” But for that very reason we need to work hard to understand how our terms work, especially how they “direct the attention”: What does this language ask me to see? What does it prevent me from seeing? And—perhaps most important of all: Who benefits from my attention being directed this way rather than that?*3

Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

So that’s the story so far: in search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths—and at every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think. We can only hope that there are strategies by which we might counteract the force of those habits—and develop new and better ones.

As we seek those new and better habits we should, in the meantime, be tolerant of our inevitable shortcomings. As Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky remind us, nothing is to be gained by demanding that we adhere to a standard of objective rationality that no human being can manage.

My friend Mark Lewis, an actor and longtime teacher of acting, tells his students that the key to playing a really nasty character, and saying and doing the really nasty things that make up that character, is to realize that in different circumstances you could be that person.

Moreover, if, as is also often said, you don’t fully understand the resources and tendencies of your native language until you learn another one, the same is surely true of moral and political languages.

heuristics—the strategies of simplification that relieve cognitive load

In this light we can see that the creating of social taxonomies is a form of the mythmaking described in the previous chapter. Just as we cannot do without our metaphors and myths, we cannot do without social taxonomies. There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.

here I think we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.

In investigating the lumpings that have shaped societies past and present, we should, I believe, be charitable toward those who merely inherited the classifications that were dominant in their own times. But we should be less patient with those, like Calhoun and Sanger, who pressed to enforce their preferred categories, to encode them in law and make them permanent.

There’s a famous and often-told story about the great economist John Maynard Keynes: once, when accused of having flip-flopped on some policy issue, Keynes acerbically replied, “When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?”

About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions.

The problem, of course, and sadly, is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled, and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled.

In what sense then are they “fanatical”? In the determination and resourcefulness with which they avoid considering any alternative to their preferred views. We might consider this point a necessary ingredient of any useful definition of fanaticism: No matter what happens, it proves my point. That is, true believers’ beliefs are not falsifiable: everything can be incorporated into the system—and indeed, the more costs true believers have sunk into the system, the more determined and resourceful they will be.

help: A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others.

this failure is essentially an ethical failure. It is the failure to recognize other dialects, other contexts, other people, as having value that needs to be respected—especially, it’s tempting to say, if you want those people to respect your dialects and contexts and friends and family members, but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code-switch does to the social fabric. It rends it.

this is why Wallace was wrong to say that “you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.” You really can’t do that, which, I believe, he discovered: his ceaseless self-examination caused him ceaseless misery and contributed in a major way to his early death. Better to follow the principle articulated by W. H. Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”